Happy Halloween!

The thing is, every year of college thus far has featured Halloween on a day that could reasonably be considered "the weekend." Friday my first year, Saturday the next, and even Sunday last year sort of kind of was reason enough to "go out." As I recall, Julia and I went to see Titus Andronicus at SMOG, and it was a pretty laid-back affair (in Halloween terms), but it was still something. This year it's on a Monday, and despite the fact that I've had a few fun-sized Milky Ways and Kline played "spooky" sound effects all through dinner, I'm not really feeling it this year, which I guess is a shame, because the end of college (in my opinion) marks the end of the Halloween revival, the absolute last time you can dress up for Halloween and have it not be weird. Then again, it's very possible that I hate fun and this won't be the case at all, but I kind of feel like it'll be time to Take Myself Seriously.

To that end, I sent in a resume today to try to grab a part-time job at the college museum's tiny little new cafe. It's insane that a coffee shop needs a resume, sort of in the same way that it's insane that I may not have the "people skills" required to serve coffee. It's coffee, for Christ's sake. Still, four more hours of work would be a little extra money, and one can never have enough of that, for if one has money, one can drive to Geneseo to visit Julia, which is what I'm doing on Wednesday. I'm really excited, even though it sounds like she has tons of work, which is the norm. It really has been too long, and I can't wait to show her my new wheels, take her fun places, and generally be close to her. I feel like my inexperience with relationships has sort of come out again as she's moved out to Geneseo, but I need to remember that something as wonderful as this isn't to be taken for granted, and to treat her as such. Since we all have So Many Things going on, it's sometimes easy to lose sight of how things have to be done, and a relationship should always be fresh and new, in a way. She's really a beautiful, amazing girl, and showing her that is really the least I can do. In short, I really have to remember how lucky I am.

In lighter news, my new favorite thing on TV is Community. I have a Boardwalk Empire episode to watch, right off the back of easily the best of the current season, but after a month-long Breaking Bad binge, it's really refreshing to have a relief from heavy hourlong dramas in the form of short, funny, and witty 20-minute episodes that you can watch three of without feeling drained.

I also started work on a new gadget today, an early step in a piece for guitar and electronics I'm working on, tentatively titled "Degrade." Essentially, the piece will start with a short, minimal, kind of pretty acoustic guitar loop (already written), and over time, the loop will be degraded through the use of electronic effects. The thing I started making will (I hope) take an incoming signal (say, a clean guitar) and, at regular intervals, interrupt the guitar with another sound. Both the interval and the duration of the interrupting sound will be adjustable, and there will be a "dry/wet" knob. In theory, one could split one's electric guitar signal and run one through one effect and one through another (octaves?), and rapidly switch between one and the other using this thing. If one wanted, one could make a self-contained single-input/single-output effect using this, and I bet it'd do some seriously weird things. One day, one day...

Lots of thought!

I had a sorta weird day today. Despite sleeping for a good long while, I went through the entire day just wanting to go back to sleep. It was one of those sleepy, headachey days, and I'm not sure if caffeine addiction or "the wrong side of the bed" should take the blame. Regardless, I had to get to class (eventually), and since my hot-ass white 2001 Chevy Lumina (owww!) is still getting tuned up, I had to walk the fair distance to central campus anyway, so I wasn't really afforded any naptime. On a whim I decided to go to Kline (the cafeteria), and it was "Food Day". There were samples of goat cheeses (with signs saying "please only take one of each"), and a woman handing out quarter-full Dixie cups of Vita Coco, of which I have lots in my room. They also had lots of strawberries (very out of season) and no apples (very in season), so I don't get the "wholesome" image they were definitely trying to cultivate. I guess another surprise was that despite having "better" food, I probably ate less during that meal than I have in a while.

I then had my first ever conversation with Peter Gadsby, one of two Englishmen (that I know of) among Bard's faculty. Like Richard Aldous (apparently a diehard Ipswich Town man), Gadsby is a big football fan (of Chelsea, though he disapproves of Abramovich, which is alright). We had a nice little talk, mainly about money in the game. Talking to people like him and Richard always make me envious in a way, because they became fans of the game when teams held onto players, and before billionaires could just buy a club with no glorious history and splash cash on whoever they wanted. I read an article today on being left cold by much of the game nowadays, and I have to say, a little over a year into my avid following of the sport, I can only really get excited when Ajax or (to a lesser extent) Holland plays. I find Barcelona-Real Madrid to be a fucking borefest regardless of the "sublime" quality, and nothing in the English game really seems to matter. Italy's league is honestly a little better, particularly this season, but unfortunately, watching Ajax struggle to draws at home against teams they really should be beating (they were lucky to draw against Feyenoord) is an added downer to go with the fact that big clubs will be knocking on the door for Vertonghen and Eriksen. (Judging by his performances so far this season, they can have van der Wiel.)

Musically, I received my copy of "Welsh's Synthesizer Cookbook" in the mail today, only to discover that it isn't at all what I'm looking for. I do not care how to use a Serge to make sounds like a clarinet. Sorry, man.

Proud owner of a few new things

So I drove my first car, my beloved red 1996 Volvo 850 Turbo, to its death yesterday morning. Yes, I drove it to a junkyard. By now, it's probably a metal cube, but yesterday it was a sometimes-running machine full of memories. I kissed Julia for the first time in that car, I moved gear to and from countless shows in that car, I slept in that car, and I went everywhere in that car. It didn't sound good, it had no stereo, the trunk didn't work, but it was definitively my car. It is being replaced by a 2001 Chevy Lumina sedan, clearly a car previously owned by an old lady, with less storage space, much better mileage, and a tape deck. I love that it doesn't make noises, but mostly I love the tape deck. To celebrate (stupidly), I just bought a sealed copy of the last Carcass album (the cock-rock one) for $8. I know that album has its haters, but I think it's great; that said, I can't afford to keep paying $8 here and $10 here on little things like that when I need to pretty much be spending money on components, gas money/travel expenses where need be, and maybe a little beer. A Little Beer. I think I'm generally pretty responsible with my money, but these little impulse buys on the Internet can really add up. Oh well, at least I have Swansong on cassette, so that's cool.

Finished synth, other things

This is it! Not the first synth I've ever built, but the first I've enclosed and the first I've done extensive tinkering on myself. Battery-powered only, two oscillators into two outputs with individual low-pass filters and "blend" control. I've messed around with it for a few hours and it sounds great, and I'm hoping to record it soon, maybe later today. Next up I'm going to finish my Ampeg Scrambler clone, a pretty simple transistor-based circuit which, if it really does sound as insane as Youtube suggests, will certainly warrant some breadboarding. I also want to build another synth using NAND gates (the one I just finished uses inverters) and live input, possibly to be driven by small, simple oscillator circuits which I can patch in. Apart from that, I'm going to try my hand at an envelope follower, which seems to be (according to Bob Bielecki) the thing for synths, a voltage-controlled amplifier, and, specifically for the synth I just made, a buffered-bypass compressor for the end of an effects chain, especially if nothing I try with it can do a bit to reduce the high end my beast pumps out when the filter's cutoff frequency is very high.

I have to say, it's interesting that this is very much going to define my last year at Bard College, especially since it coincides with Julia being absolutely loaded with classes out in Geneseo. As I write this she is taking a Chemistry test, which really couldn't be more distant from what I'm up to. If I move out to Rochester next year (and please, only for a year), she'll still be very busy (double major + philosophy minor) and I'll kind of be in the "real world," though I want whatever I do to afford me ample time to learn more about electronics, as well as the obvious proximity to her, which is still very much the main reason for my planned course of action after college. To the electronics end, I purchased Welsh's Synthesizer Cookbook yesterday, which looks like it'll have a ton of good ideas, and to the Julia end, I am trying to find a new car to replace my dead '96 Volvo. I wonder if someone would give me 200 bucks for it...

What else? I am trying very, very hard to switch from drinking copious amounts of coffee to drinking copious amounts of black tea, particularly Earl Grey, which has always been my go-to. This is mainly for digestive reasons, although my body (at least initially, this time) doesn't seem to really like Earl Grey either. It's possible that it's other things, too, though: I've been taking Wheat Grass powder, eating at pretty irregular hours, not sleeping enough, looking for a new car, etc., all of which can take its toll (though it's probably not the car). My beloved Ajax, off the back of a horrendous run which has seen one win (against Noordwijk, a fourth-tier side) in seven games, put in a fine performance in Zagreb, Croatia to put them ahead of Lyon on goal difference halfway through the Champions League group stages. This is a bit of excitement after a very shaky draw with AZ in the run-up to the year's first Klassieker, which should be a tighter affair than in years past, what with Ajax not performing consistently (on which I can only partly blame injuries) and Feyenoord being a much stronger side this year.

And whoa, (former) Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi is dead. Seemed like a horrible leader and person, so I'm not so sad to see him go, but I wonder where those who hold power will go now that the loyalist movement there is well and truly dead. I've heard that there's been a lot of infighting, and given the vast diversity in cultural/religious identity in the Middle East, I can't really see that region being ruled by anything other than autocrats. Then again, I'm not exactly a political authority, so who knows? Read news.

Wow

So because my car is barely still a car, I've been walking everywhere. The music building, where I do my work, could not be farther from Manor, where I live, so today I spent upwards of fourteen hours out of my room, despite still being on campus. Weird!

In that time, I "completed" a ten-minute piece for Electronic Music Composition, which, I'm sad to say, I kind of half-assed. The first five minutes were an earlier piece I'm pretty proud of, but after spending two unsatisfying hours messing around with my friend Flo's Utopia Synth, which I'd been hoping to do something with, I sort of redid an existing piece with some new sounds, a few of which came from the Utopia Synth, and honestly, I don't like it as much. Richard Teitelbaum has been adamant that we are to try our hand at making a longer piece, but while I appreciate being challenged, the timing was not right for this.

Unfortunately, I find that timing is always a problem with me and experimental music. I always feel like if I can just get my hands on that one piece of gear, my setup will lack nothing, and I'll be able to produce tons of great sounds. Lately that one piece is the synth I'm building, and after that I'm almost sure it'll be the Ampeg Scrambler clone. After that, who knows? Another synth? I hate that I'm never able to focus on one particular instrument long enough to master it, as evidenced by my flirtations with guitar and drums, although with both of those I feel like the issue has honestly been the lengths to which one must go to practice at Bard (walk to security, surrender meal-giving ID, get key, practice, walk back to security, etc.). Ideally, when I have my own place, I'll be able to play whatever whenever, although obviously that's more realistic in a huge house than in a small apartment, which sadly seems to be the recent college graduate's destiny. I did end up playing drums today, and it was still a ton of fun. When I'm able to practice consistently for a week or two it all comes back, and I remember why I love playing drums, but in the meantime it's hard, and my drum setup certainly isn't ideal either. Jesus, my snare sucks. Sounds like a tub!

Anyway, Bob Bielecki is going to take a look at the troublesome filter circuit in my synth tomorrow. Thing works for about fifteen seconds, then powers down, then works for another fifteen when powered back up. Probably a capacitor problem, but I'm really at my wit's end trying to figure out what the hell's the matter. From there, the sky's the limit!

Man...

I've noticed that I always do this thing, and it's starting to get to me: I develop a mindset where I feel like I need ONE MORE THING to be able to achieve my goal. This applies primarily to the music I make; despite the fact that I now have an Access Virus, part of me feels I literally cannot create anything until the synth I'm working on is done, and after that's done, I probably won't feel "complete" until my Ampeg Scrambler pedal is done, and so on. I just spent three hours fucking around with my friend Flo's Utopia Synth but really couldn't come up with anything I liked in the slightest, especially not ten minutes of sound for my Electronic Music Composition midterm. I was able to use it effectively for a reworking of a piece I already presented for the class, "Annihilation," which now has a second part and is about eleven minutes long. I think it was better as a five-minute piece, but hey, these things happen. As I recall, Flo paid $180 for this Utopia, but it honestly does not do much, and I don't really like it. $180 should probably get you a little more bang for your buck, but I guess it looks pretty neat and has a layout and PCB.

Anyway, I guess the point of my writing this is to say that while forever getting excited about the next project I'm working on will probably serve me quite well as I pursue greater knowledge of electronics in years to come, I'm at a point right now where I need to produce results, and I'm probably far enough behind on my project that I can't afford to throw out as much as I do. I know this synth I'm making is going to be great and useful (lord knows I've put in the hours to make sure it's that way), but what if it becomes another thing I use intensely for a month and then forget about?

Almost one year!

Hi, Internet! Something Julia said yesterday made me sort of wonder why I just stopped "blogging," and I'm supposed to be putting together a presentation on the jazz drummer Art Blakey, so what better way to put that off? At the very least I am currently listening to an album my dad listens to a lot, Art Blakey with the Original Jazz Messengers. I've heard this record many times, starting way before I knew anything about jazz. (It is still debatable whether or not I know anything about jazz.) Allmusic gave this one four stars out of five, but I have probably listened to this three times as much as I have Kind of Blue or A Love Supreme. I guess I would call it a pleasant listen, although supposedly this record is "hard bop," characterized by extreme tempos, long harmonies, and aggressive playing. The first track, "Infra-Rae," is indeed really fast, and I think that's the one I'm going to play for the class tomorrow. The track I'm now on, "Nica's Dream," is something I would put on while having some friends over for a nice dinner or something. Who knows, I've probably heard this tune at my aunt's nice town house in Greenwich Village as the family gathered round for roast beef with scallops and red wine. It is long and smooth, a Horace Silver composition which is heavily reliant on piano, played by Horace Silver. I'm drinking a cup of coffee and listening to jazz in my room, and I must say, it's pretty decent. Interestingly, this is probably the first time I have written about jazz since I took Jazz Harmony I my freshman year of college, and was honestly considering studying jazz. Things sure have changed.

And boy, what they have changed into. Since my last post, I have gotten much deeper into the world of electronics. Julia got me her dad's Access Virus digital synth as an early birthday present, and that thing can make some really great drones, as well as, Youtube tells me, some pretty trashy Eurohouse. I will probably rely heavily on it to produce a ten-minute piece by Tuesday for Richard Teitelbaum's Electronic Music Composition workshop, even though I'm still getting the hang of what it can do. Slightly less complicated, but exciting nonetheless, is my current project, a dual-oscillator synth based heavily on the Weird Sound Generator circuit, with some deviations that have come from weeks of breadboarding the thing. I spent about eleven hours on it last night and it's barely half-enclosed, having already populated the three(!) circuitboards, and having discovered that one of the two filter circuits does not quite work. If I can find the time, I'm going to troubleshoot that ASAP, since everything else that I've done is sounding great. It'll be battery-powered and switchable between regulated and unregulated voltage (completely different tones result from the two), with two outputs, each with a great low-pass filter, volume knob, and a knob for balance between the two oscillators, each of which have four variable pots and three switches for pretty much total control over the sounds. After that, I'm working on an Ampeg Scrambler clone, a treble booster (which I can maybe sell), and a Proco Rat distortion clone which my friend Rory paid me for over a year ago (sorry dude!).

If I continue posting stuff here, it'll probably mostly be about electronics geekery, so bear with me. I am currently working towards the final step in my degree from Bard College, so project is on the brain. Julia came up with the excellent idea of taking some electronics classes at RIT next fall, which is nearer to Geneseo, where she is. As I don't really see the need to move straight to Brooklyn, that sounds like a fine solution, and perhaps it'll bring me one step closer to selling a huge expensive thing to Radiohead and profiting immensely. That isn't actually my goal, by the way: I love the thought of making my own instruments, which produce sounds only I have access to and which only I know how to control. If all goes well, immediate postgraduate life will involve a job that pays for things (probably food service; set the bar low!), close proximity to my best friend (even if that means Rochester), time to learn about electronics, and time to do something with them. Seems pretty simple, and I think therein lies the appeal: since I don't have a huge career in the music industry waiting for me, the chance to continue learning and to be happy seems to be one worth treasuring.

That said, it sure is going to be weird living life without insanely long vacations. I guess my plan for this summer is to work Bard's Summerscape again (which I did last summer), which should be fun, but my last "real" vacation will be going to Brazil with Julia. I've never been, and furthermore I haven't left this continent in quite some time now (last two out-of-US trips were to Canada and Mexico, and even Canada was over a year ago). I do not speak more than a word or two of Portuguese, but I went down to the City and got my visa last week, so it's happening! Additionally, I like that I'm able to pay my own way for something extravagant; it feels "adult" in a way, and I feel like I've earned it. That aside, it's going to be awesome hitting the beach in January. Julia and I have talked about moving south after college, but she still has a year after I'm done, so any escape from the northeastern winter in the meantime is welcome! Anyway, wow, I should probably stop and put my presentation together.

I really will end with this: Razor's 1990 album Shotgun Justice is hands-down the most contrasting display of cover art and music ever. Look at this beast:

Have you ever seen a worse album cover, like, ever? It in no way prepared me from probably the best pure thrash album I've ever heard. (It's better than Kill 'Em All, and Ride the Lightning and later are something else.) This is my favorite album of 1990, I've decided, a year which included Judas Priest's Painkiller, Megadeth's Rust in Peace, and the Black Album, which I strangely have a soft spot for. I've also recently been turned on to the Devil's Blood, an "occult hard rock" band from Eindhoven, Netherlands. They have an album coming out in November that I am looking forward to immensely after hearing their debut, 2009's The Time of No Time Evermore. Parts of it remind me of Thin Lizzy, but other parts remind me of Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac, which is a really interesting combination. I showed them to Daniel and he loved the instrumentals but hated the female vocals; weirdly, I think that makes this band stand out from a lot of other stuff, which is also sort of the reason I like Fleetwood so much. Anyway, this was fun; hope to do it again soon!